The Youngblood Family

This a my second throw back to July 2008 brought to you by myspace blog.

Thursday, July 31, 2008
doctor’s appointment
Category: Life
So I went to the specialist and he was really positive and upbeat. He seemed to think after looking over all our "issues" that there was a pretty good chance of us not only getting pregnant but also getting pregnant through artificial inseminations or just "naturally" with the help of medicine. Part of me is excited and happy to hear the news while the other part of me is frustrated because we are regressing. I already did one month of "natural" plus medicine and it didn't work which is why my gyno tried to attack the infertility more aggressively by doing an artificial insemination. But, at least he said he was positive and that it looked good for us to conceive. So we are backing up a step and taking it easy. The good news is that the doctor said I didn't have to take my basal temp anymore! AMEN!! That was great to hear because I hate doing it. In fact, his exact words were, "No, just wing it…be wild and crazy this month." I like his style! But I don't know how wild and crazy you can be while taking meds and given an intercourse schedule of what days to "have relations" and when not too, etc. But wild and crazy it is! So, that's pretty much it. He didn't really shed any new light on PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome) because I've read everything I can get my hands on about it. He did, however, run a serious of hormone tests to make sure I was pretty much in range to where I need to be and I got the results already…I am J So, that's it. The only bad news I was given (kind of already knew but got the grime statistics to go with it) was that women with PCOS carry a 47% chance of miscarriage in the first trimester and therefore, if I do become pregnant I will have to go in for weekly blood tests to make sure my progesterone levels are where they should be so I don't miscarry. I can go weekly for blood donations…that's cool with me. Whatever it takes, right? So this month we're taking a step back, being wild and crazy, winging it, and calling at the end of the month with either a no period or a period and going from there.

Anxiety from fear of being so messed up I can't conceive is over for now. Let's see how this month works out!

Okay, so I originally posted this on Saturday, July 26, 2008 on my myspace blog. But, it explains what was going on before I went to the RE, Dr. Kaufmann for the first time.

Infertility and how hard it is on me

So I was reading this book, The Infertility Survival Guide by Judith Daniluk, Ph.D., and it's been pretty helpful. One of the suggestions in the book for coping with infertility is to journal. This is my journal because I type faster than I can write and this has spell check :-) So, being that this is my "journal" this will contain personal information about me. Don't read it if you can't handle hearing details. Anyway, here's the deal:

My husband and I have been married for 4 wonderful years and given my gynecological history (had emergency surgery to have an ovarian cyst removed when I was 16) we decided to start trying for our big family early because we suspected to have difficulty. I came off birth control 6 months after we were married and in December of 2004 we officially started trying for a child. It is now July 2008 and we are still childless. To say that the last four years has been difficult is an understatement.

Our lives have been full of doctor's appointments, tests, screenings, unanswered questions, answered questions, but still no results. I've been poked, probed, drugged, and still no baby. I've watched people all around me get pregnant accidentally, intentionally, and unwantingly. I've been to baby showers, baby stores, and I've even thrown one for one of my close friends. I get asked all the time, "when are you going to have one of your own?" to which there is no painless way of responding.

Throughout the entire process the one problem I have had the most is that people do not understand what we're going through, and why would they? I'm not angry that people don't understand, hell I don't understand half the time, but be sensitive to the pain, hurt, loss, and grief my husband and I have experienced every month for the past four years. The process began with gynecological visits for me because I was not menstruating correctly. Every seemed to be fine and the doctors just said keep trying. I was 23 at the time and most doctors don't even consider infertility until 1 year of trying...so we started trying.

Throughout the first year I pretty much had 2 menstrual cycles. Ordinarily, my irregular periods were nothing more than annoying but when you are trying to conceive it serves as a big problem. After the first year of trying to the extent of having unprotected intercourse, the next year we stepped it up a bit and started using ovulation kits. This is when I originally thought they were stupid, a waste of money, and didn't work. Turns out it was my body, not the tests, that didn't work. So after a year of trying, ovulation tests that only produced 1 positive result in 12 months of taking them, and still not baby, I decided to change doctors and started the screening process for infertility.

Since that decision, I have been diagnosed with hypothyroidism (contributes to weight gain and infertility), poly cystic ovarian disease (contributes to weight gain, irregular periods or no periods, stops ovulation, causes an over production of male hormones, and causes infertility), and my husband has also found that he too contributes to our infertility. We laugh because some statistics show that 60% of infertility is from the woman and only 40% is from the man but in our case we have 100% infertility! We're just glad we can find humor in the pain... These diagnoses didn't come easy or free. We've spent thousands of dollars, countless hours, and many sleepless nights to find out these answers but they really aren't complete answers. No one can tell us why we can't get pregnant; they can only give us possible reasons as to what is negatively influencing the lack of pregnancy. That's not good enough for me. If I have to endure all the battery of tests, and blood work, and sonograms that I've gone through I want answers. Evidently, it doesn't work that way. Who knew?

For the last 3 years I've had to take my BBT or Basal Body Temperature as soon as I open my eyes in the morning. I'm not allowed to do anything but turn off the alarm clock (I have to take it at 6am every morning) and stick the thermometer in my mouth until it beeps signaling me to carry on with my life. Then I have to write down the temperature on my chart to which I have to indicate every little detail of my life from my over the counter Advil's to my sexual intercourse, to if I didn't get a full night's rest the evening before all of which can affect my BBT. This temp is supposed to help show what my body is doing. It's all pretty interesting in the beginning, but gets old FAST! My favorite quote regarding my experience in year 3 of infertility is this:

I don't think doctors understand how hateful that damn thermometer is. You stick that thing in your mouth every morning and the first thing you say to yourself every day is shit—I'm infertile. It's a hit in the face every morning. And then as if that's not bad enough, you have to circle the number of times you've had intercourse and bring it in so they can check to make sure you're doing it enough. I mean, we had one doctor who told us that our chances of conceiving would be much better if we had sex every night during the middle of the month. At times the pressure was just too much. Sometimes we ended up in an argument and one or the other of us said, to hell with it…just mark the damn circle."

So fast forward to last month (June)…I'm on all sorts of daily medications to help my body decide it wants to be pregnant and we go in for our first artificial insemination. Now this happens after taking 100mg of Clomid and for 10 days and having a sonogram and blood work done every week since the last week of April, and getting a shot in the butt the day before. That's a long time to be working on getting ready for one procedure. Anyway, the morning of the "procedure" was pretty exciting for me. I was radiating from ear to ear with excitement, I didn't sleep for days leading up to this day but especially not the night before! We got up early so my husband could give his "donation" and we took it to the doctor's office where they had to "wash" it and "prep" it for injection so they tell us to go have some breakfast and come back in an hour. Though, I appreciated the fact that I was told to go eat something, I was too nervous, anxious, and excited to think about consuming food. After all this might actually be the day I conceive a child! So after an hour goes by, we head back up the waiting room of the doctor's office. I'm surrounded by pregnant women, women with children, pictures of babies, magazines like Conceive, and Parenting. All thoughts are on a baby. At this point my loving, easy going husband is even antsy with anticipation! We finally get called back and I'm just about to burst open with excitement armed with my lucky ring and picture of my two ripened eggs that was taken the day before in my sonogram! Not only was I excited about the entire procedure but my chances had increased with the presence of two eggs instead of just one! All in all, the procedure wasn't that bad. It was basically just a catheter inserted vaginally and then they injected my husband's sperm in and raised my back half up in the air at an almost 45 degree angle to the floor to which I sat like that for about 30 minutes. Then they said carry on with the rest of your day and we wait until either a missed period or a period.

WHAT? Are you kidding me? All this technology around me and the only thing you can say is we wait for a period or a missed period before I get to know anything??? Come on! Guess what, we waited. I was also instructed that I couldn't take pee tests because in order for the doctor to stimulate my ovary to ovulate they had to inject hcg in me, which is the hormone used to detect pregnancy in pee tests. If I took the pee test it would show to be positive even if I wasn't actually pregnant…or so they say… Each day that went by was even more exciting than the day before. I read on pregnancy websites what could be happening and I refreshed myself on the "early signs of pregnancy" on a daily basis. The excitement was too much so I decided to take a pee test! I know I was told not to but I thought it would be fun to see a positive result on a pee test after all these years even if I knew that did not mean a positive pregnancy. So the next morning, I peed on a stick and it was NEGATIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SERIOUSLY???? Yes, seriously! I happened to have had to go the doctor the same day so they could test my progesterone levels so I asked about the negative pee test to which I was told that didn't mean I wasn't pregnant, it just meant that the hcg they injected in me was no longer in my blood and that if a pee test came back positive after day 11 that it probably was a true reading. That made me feel better but not really. I just wanted to see a positive reading from my own pee. I know what a plus sign looks like, but it's different when it turns to a plus sign after you pee on it! It's like a little bit of magic…that I still didn't get to experience!

After around day 11 from the procedure I started to have anxiety because around that time if my period was going to come I would start to drop in my basal temperature. Each day I was scared to look at the reading on the thermometer for fear it might be indicating that I wasn't pregnant again. Fortunately for me, it maintained to be elevated every day. In fact, on day 11 it shot up higher than it had been ever in the three years that I had been taking my temps! I immediately googled to see if that meant anything I should know about. I read a lot of information which lead me to believe it was a stronger likelihood that I was in fact pregnant than wasn't! I was elated. Everyday my husband called me to find out what my temp was that day since I couldn't look at it until around lunch time (that's how long it took me to sneak up on the thing for fear of bad news). Each day I happily reported back that my temp remained elevated! The day it shot up, I didn't tell anyone because in all my readings it said it had to stay up for at least 5 days to indicate a "possible" pregnancy. I didn't want to get any one's hopes up (even though mine were in outer space) but on day three of the seriously elevated temp I informed my husband and my doctor both of which reacted very positively to the news. By day 20 after the artificial insemination my temp was still elevated, my period was now late by a week and a half at this point, and on paper one might assume a pregnancy so it was time for the moment of truth, the blood test.

So I went in that morning and they took my blood and then they informed me that they wouldn't have the results until the next day. I asked to not be called until after 4:30pm because I had a final next day for my last grad school class and I didn't want to get bad news and do poorly and I didn't want to get good news and not be able to concentrate and do poorly so I opted for no news until after the test. My nurse said that was fine and we parted ways. The final came and went a lot faster than I thought and the moment I walked out of class I called the doctor's office to let them know I was finished with my test and I could hear the results of my blood work now, except for one small problem…they didn't have the results in yet so I ended up having to wait until almost 6PM and it KILLED me. I couldn't sit still, I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't even pee (I thought about doing a pee test to see my results). I was a nervous wreck! Finally, out of no where I hear the sounds of Beyonce playing, "You must not know bout me," in the living room and I run to my cell phone to see the doctor's office calling me. I pick it up and don't even say hello, instead I say do you have good news for me? To which I hear silence, looking back in retrospect that half a second of silence was probably due to my nurse not expecting me to pick up the phone that way but in that moment I knew the answer and I felt a little piece of me die. She paused and said, "I'm afraid not. Your pregnancy test came back negative. If you still don't get a period by next week, we'll run it again. I'm so sorry Julie. It really looked like you were going to get a positive result this time." I gracefully told her thank you for letting me know and got off the phone.

I remember closing the flip phone and it dropped to the floor like a building crashing to the ground after an explosion. Tears filled my eyes and I sat alone on my couch wondering what I had done to deserve this pain, this loss once again. I sat and cried for 2 hours straight until my husband walked in the door from work. He knew the fact that I hadn't called him at that point indicated a no so he just walked over, sat down next to me, scooped me up in his arms, and cried with me. Unless you have gone through this kind of pain, it's really hard to describe but these passages from the book In Pursuit of Fertility by Dr. Robert Franklin are the best I can do.

For the couples who go home without a baby, infertility is a tragedy. It is a loss—and one that is not easy to accept. When a patient leaves my care without a child in her arms after trying to conceive for years, it hurts. In fact, after working with infertile couples for almost thirty years, I still get angry and sad just thinking about the unfairness of infertility. I try to help couples understand that grief is a normal process of infertility. Grief is a healthy bodily response not only to losing someone or something very dear but also to losing a dream. As such, it must be experienced if we are to purge ourselves of the pain. We grieve over actual losses, such as the death of a loved one or the loss of a significant relationship, a valued job, our home, or our pet. But we also grieve over the loss of our fantasies. In infertility, our dream is to have a child. It is the loss of that dream or its feared loss that pushes the infertile couple into a grieving state.

The tears never completely went away but after about 2 weeks they were a little more under control. It was hard for Josh too and though he certainly didn't say what he was feeling as eloquently as this quote, he did say the same thing…

If my wife was sobbing at night on one side of the bed, I would just turn over and not be of any sort of comfort…I couldn't really listen to her…to what she was communicating and the feelings of emptiness…the feelings of being alone, of feeling hurt. My reaction was to be very silent, withdrawing, not wanting to talk about it because I knew I couldn't fix it, and it killed me to think I couldn't stop her pain.

I got myself under control emotionally as best I could and started focusing on other things to occupy my time. It was really hard because all of my closest friends have either babies or kids in general so I had to distance myself. I couldn't be around kids because it was just a constant reminder of how I failed again in that department. It's like a slap in the face and though I want to see my niece, or watch my little "P" grow up and reach her milestones, it's too difficult sometimes for me to deal with it so I just have to avoid it all together. The hardest part is that it comes in phases. I could be driving down the road and song comes on that sends me to tears, or I could read a sign and I think about something and I'm blubbering like an idiot. It's just hard; harder than I could have ever imagined. The only thing in my life I have ever been certain about is being a mother and that seems to be the only thing in my life that I can't accomplish. You know for a woman, infertility is twofold. One is to never have the opportunity to be a biological mother. Two is to never carry a child inside of you and feel what it's like to nurture another life in that way. To never get to feel the awesome power of pushing a child into this world and hearing its first cries and knowing that you gave that child life. It's two huge losses, not just one.

So that leads us to the present and we are in the same spot we were in the beginning. We were referred to a specialist and our first appointment is next week Thursday. I'm nervous and excited but mostly anxious. The doctor is supposed to look over our file and "determine" our possibilities and avenues to explore for our infertility. I'm trying to keep an open mind but I'm pretty opinionated so it's hard. I have reservations about several of the procedures in the assisted reproductive technology…we'll have to see how it goes. Pray for us.

The Youngblood Family

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Tomorrow = NERVOUS TONIGHT

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Another Throw Back...My First Appointment with my RE

Infertility & How Hard It's Been on Me...a Throw Back to July 2008

Monday, March 9, 2009

Stupid Ovaries

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Come on Ovaries

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Crossing my fingers

Monday, March 2, 2009

Positive results...here I come!

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